January 6, 2025

CIE President Ken Stein addressed “Jimmy Carter’s Middle East Legacies” during a webinar hosted by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East in cooperation with the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa on January 6, 2025. Dr. Stein took audience questions from moderator Asaf Romirowsky, the executive director of SPME and ASMEA, during the last 12 minutes of the 68-minute session. The transcript of the Q&A portion, including the question of Carter’s feelings about Jews, is here. The full video is available on the SPME site and the ASMEA site.

Romirowsky: What are your thoughts on what came out as Dershowitz’s statement that Carter advised Arafat to reject the peace process in Camp David in 2000 and what was the cost of Carter reaching out to Haniyeh and Assad in ’09? Any thoughts on that?

Stein: I have no knowledge of his personal communications with Arafat, either in 2000. I would have no knowledge of it. I find it hard to believe that people can be so far away from the source material and speculate so eloquently and completely. I do know that his embrace of Hamas, I do from the collection of information which I have found and which we posted on our website: “Jimmy Carter’s Embrace of Hamas” is a collection of quotations from Hamas officials and from Carter that they felt gratified that Carter had given them a measure of legitimacy, and they say so. Haniyeh, I believe, says it. I think Mashaal says it. And I believe that you go back and you listen to what people say, or you read what they say, and then you sort of put them together, and then you create some sort of an evidentiary mass, and those are your conclusions.

But let’s be fair to Carter. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to embrace Hamas. There were others in the United States. Martin Indyk thought it would be a great idea, may he rest in peace. He thought it was a great idea to embrace Hamas. And there were others who put their hand up and said, “You know, we have to find a way for the Palestinians, the PLO and the PA, to reconcile with Hamas because if we do, then we can get negotiations started with the Israelis.” That was the assumption. So what mediators want to do is they want to find ways to glue the problems together so that you can move forward to resolving the next aspect of the problem. And as we know, as we’ve learned since Hamas was established in ’88, that all those efforts trying to get the PA and the PLO to speak with Hamas or to engage with Hamas on an equal basis, we know that all those efforts of unity have
fallen on hard rocks.

There’s a different view. There’s one view within the Palestinian National Movement that says we could probably live here alongside with the Israelis, and there’s another view within the Palestinian Arab National Movement that says we can’t live with any Israeli or any Jew west of the Jordan River. And those are the realities, and no amount of papering over them will make them go away.

I can’t speculate on whether Arafat did or did not embrace Camp David 2000. If I had been Arafat, I wouldn’t have embraced it because why would he want to give up the liberation of Palestine when he’d lived that life for his entire career? Was he really believing that he could recognize the State of Israel and give up the right of return? I mean, let’s be serious about who influenced whom. What were the bottom-line questions that were being asked in 2000? I mean, Clinton tried very hard. He tried very hard, diligently, with really smart people as his advisers, but you can’t get someone to move away from their fossilized view if the fossilized view is all they have. If I had time, I’d tell you a story about my own meeting with Arafat in ’93, but that’s for another time.

But the point is Arafat understood full well what he represented for the Palestinian National Movement, and he understood that ’93 and accepting Oslo was his way of retaining his position in the leadership of the PLO, and he alienated so many members of the PLO executive committee by recognizing Israel. But he did it because he needed to preserve his own autocracy within the movement. He was a very successful politician. Whether he represented his people appropriately or properly is not for me to decide.

Romirowsky: Great. Thank you. Let me try to combine two more questions here, given our limited time. But some questions … about really more your views on Carter’s feeling about the Jewish people and antisemitism and really how did that fit into his biblical upbringing, and how did he understand the Bible and the New Testament and their view of Jews in general as a result of his biblical upbringing?

Stein: I don’t know, and I’m not being coy here. And I’m not saying it because we haven’t yet had his funeral. My sense was that in the White House he surrounded himself with some really terrific advisers, some of whom were Jewish. He did the same thing at the Carter Center. Many of us who were fellows were Jewish, some practicing, some not, but we were ethnically identified as certainly being Jewish.

Did he take care to observe the holidays and the outlooks that some of us had as Jews? The answer is yes.

Did he have a biblical background which suggested that the fact that the Jews didn’t embrace Christ was their shortcoming? Perhaps.

But where does he take that? Does he take that to being an overt antisemite? You have to show that to me.

Did he call for Israelis to be killed until they accepted a road map for peace, as he did in Palestine Peace Not Apartheid? That’s what he said in the first draft of the book, and one of the major reasons why I resigned. He was saying that terrorism is OK until Israelis do X. Well, that wasn’t something I could stomach, and 12 members of the Carter Presidential Center, Carter Library, they said, “You know, Ken, your argument is right. We’ll follow.” When he went around the country and he said, “I wrote every word of the book, and I’m taking full responsibility for it,” I think he compounded it. But then when they wrote a second edition and never called it a second edition, they took out that sentence from the book.

And let me leave you with this note. We were returning on our trip from the Middle East in 1983 on a private, I think it was a 727, at about 25,000 feet. We had just left Beirut, and we were on the way to Morocco, and it was a Friday afternoon/evening, and it was getting to be dusk. And it’s President Carter, Mrs. Carter, his diligent administrative assistant, Faye Dill, and me. And the wine steward brings four glasses of wine, and then he turns to the wine steward, and he said, “Would you bring the candles and bring the challah?” I looked at him and I said, “Where’d you get the challah?” He said, “When we were in Jerusalem three days ago, I got the challah. I asked the steward to go buy one because I knew we would be here on Friday night going to Morocco.” And then he said to me, “Ken, would you say the Friday night blessing and light the candles?” And I did, as I’ve done my entire life.

Now that was a telling moment for me. Did he disregard my Jewishness? No. Did he dislike Israeli policies? Absolutely, particularly as it had an impact upon the Palestinians and withdrawal. And he thought Begin lied to him. But I think Carter had a sense of respect for other religions, including mine, and I never felt, and I don’t think any other person at the Carter Center who was Jewish ever felt, any tinge of something that was not exactly the way it should be in terms of behavior and attitudes. It’s easy to put a label on someone when you’re far, and you think it smells like it, it must be it. I can’t state what someone wants me to state simply because it would be convenient, and then someone would quote it later on and say, “You know, Stein in that interview with SPME said